3 Website Marketing Strategies Proven to Increase Conversions These ecommerce techniques are sustainable, cost-effective and easy to implement.
By Gabriel Shaoolian Edited by Matt Scanlon
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You've launched your new, beautiful and fully optimized website.
Now what? Where will the traffic come from? How will you retain visitors? How will you convert them? To turn a website into the profitable marketing channel it was meant to be, you need to implement effective and sustainable marketing tactics.
1. Retargeting
Most users need to see your brand five to seven times to merely remember it, let alone engage with or buy from it. In other words, you can attract a lot of traffic to a website, but if return visitor rates are low, it's unlikely that the needle move on conversions — new users' interactions with your brand will end as quickly as they began. So, to increase conversions, you need to attract qualified traffic, but also retain visitors. How? Through retargeting...essentially ads that follow visitors after they leave your website.
The main premise of retargeting is that the more users see your brand, the more likely they are to remember it, return to a website, and convert, and it has proven to be highly effective. In fact, retargeting has at least ten times higher clickthrough rates than display ads. Plus, it's easy to implement and affordable; you only pay for clicks, and the CPC rates run between one and two dollars.
Related: How Clever Retargeting Persuades Customers Who Looked But Didn't Buy
2. Email marketing
No matter how impressed they are with an offering, website visitors will lose interest without continuous exposure to a brand. This includes both recent prospects and long-term customers. To keep people engaged, give them an opportunity and an incentive to input emails, because email marketing is one of the most effective channels for nurturing warm leads and customer loyalty.
A simple weekly newsletter is enough to keep your brand on top of users' minds, but more complex automated email workflows can do wonders in minimizing cart abandonment and boosting revenue. And, we haven't even scratched the surface of how email campaigns can turn window shoppers into first-time buyers and increase repeat sales among existing customers. Such marketing can generate no less than $36 for each dollar invested, making it one of the most effective channels for leveraging return visitors and conversions.
Depending on audience size and automation requirements, email marketing can also be affordable. For smaller databases and simpler campaigns, MailChimp can handle needs on a free subscription, while the more sophisticated platforms such as Klaviyo can cost north of $100 per month. Whatever option you choose, keep in mind that consistency is key; you want to send emails in consistent intervals (usually either weekly or biweekly) and to identify peak performance times that show optimal open and click rates.
Related: How I Generated Over $20 Million in New Business Using Cold Email Outreach
3. Content marketing
This strategy involves the strategic use of various types of content to reach specific marketing goals. In this case, goals are to increase qualified website traffic, engagement and conversions. One of its advantages is that it generates three-times more leads than outbound marketing, and does so for a 60% lower spend.
It involves some basic tactics:
SEO content
This helps your website rank for relevant keywords and attract qualified audiences through search engines. You want to create search-optimized landing pages to attract users with a high purchase intent, and also use blogs optimized for informational keywords to attract users at the discovery stage (i.e., those that are likely to be interested in your offering further down the line). SEO is the most sustainable website marketing tactic of all. More than 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search! And, unlike paid ads that give just short-term traffic boosts, SEO can bring traffic and leads continuously, and over the long haul.
Product or service guides
These encompass either blog-like content or shareable brochures that detail the benefits and "how-to"s specific to your offering. They can help improve the user experience for top- to mid-funnel website visitors, as well as for existing customers. High-level product or service overviews educate prospects on your offering and help move them from the interest into the consideration stage. More in-depth how-to guides help existing customers optimize their use of a product or service and, in doing so, promote greater customer satisfaction, loyalty and repeat sales.
Gated content
This is another term for downloadable content like whitepapers, ebooks, templates, exclusive case studies and so on. It usually appears in the form of pop-ups or prominent calls to action (CTAs) strategically placed on relevant landing pages. To download, the user provides their email address, among other data, and hopefully goes from a cold to a warm lead more open to your communication.
Related: 3 Critical Principles of Effective Calls to Action
Attracting qualified website traffic and growing conversions takes continuous effort and optimization. Retargeting, email and content marketing are the most effective and affordable strategies every professional website owner should leverage. So, set aside a monthly budget for such marketing based on the goals you want to achieve. Start small, test, evaluate and optimize campaigns regularly, increasing a budget incrementally when you start to see results.
